


Waiting for a Way Out

by Nightsrk



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Food Issues, Other, Post-Apocalypse, Roleswap, Suicidal Thoughts, but you should know this is like, i tagged this as 'chose not to use warnings' because none of them apply, just a clown car of trauma, she's trapped at the end of the world and needs to survive and it's not fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:15:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26884975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightsrk/pseuds/Nightsrk
Summary: Time passes beyond the end of the world, and Seven is the only one to witness it.
Relationships: Dolores/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 32
Kudos: 130





	Waiting for a Way Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiveyaaas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/gifts).



> Uhhh, hello! Took a break from the next chapter of _Two Feet Forward_ to write this. This is the intro one-shot to what will be a Five and Vanya multichaptered roleswap fic, once I finish TFF. 
> 
> sidenote- the formatting on this fic fucked itself really badly and I have spent ages trying to fix it and I'm just slowly going insane, so I apologize if it's not totally fixed
> 
> I'm going to include full warnings at the end, in case you're concerned about anything specific. I will say before you begin reading - this is not a happy fic. Please tread carefully.
> 
> I had a lot of fun writing it! And I'm excited to do the full roleswap :)

There is to be no talking at mealtimes at the Umbrella Academy: a rule strictly adhered to in the letter of the law, but never the spirit. The dry, uninteresting voice of Herr Carlson details how to tie a rope harness as they eat, mostly silently but for the scrape of cutlery on plates and muted chewing sounds. While her siblings might be _quiet_ , Number Seven muses, they are by no means focused on the meal. Number Six has a book held open in front of him as he chews absentmindedly, and Seven is more sure than not that Four is rolling a joint under the table.

More and more, Four has become unable to get through the days without _something_ clouding his eyes. Father’s temper has only become shorter and more cross because of it, more cutting when he addresses Four.

 _Her_ pills went up two weeks ago - three doses of carbamazepine at 200mg each. It makes Seven feel fuzzy and sick, her tongue swollen, head spinning. Mom says she’ll adjust - Seven would prefer to go back to her old dose. She felt fine before, and she doesn’t feel good now. Isn’t that the point of medicine?

However - while most of her siblings might at least be playing at the idea of a quiet lunch, Number Five isn’t eating. 

Seven chews slowly on the roasted potato in her mouth - it tastes like ashes. She hasn’t been able to taste anything since her dose increased, and taps a second potato with the tines of her fork when Five’s gaze flickers over to her.

He doesn’t start eating, goes back to staring at their Father like he’s itching for a fight, like Number Two baiting Number One. 

And then he picks up his knife and thrusts it point down into the table.

“Number Five?” their Father barks. It isn’t really a question.

“I have a question,” Five says, a slow smile curling at the edges of his mouth. That’s not a question, either. He lets go of the knife to curl his hand under his chin, a mock imitation of the politely inquiring schoolboy.

 _Let it go, Five_ _,_ Seven thinks, ignoring the tears already prickling at the corner of her eyes. She puts more food in her face, because it’s meal time, we’re to be _eating_ and not _speaking_ , Five.

But no, Five says “I _want_ to time travel,” all imperious and self-assured.

“No,” their Father says, bored and utterly assured of himself. 

_That’s enough, Five_ , Seven thinks, catching his ankle with her shoe. He glances back at her, frowning. He turns back to Father, ignoring her warning.

“But I’m _ready_ ,” Five says to Father. Seven kicks his ankle again - he pushes his chair back from the table and stands. “I’ve been practicing my spatial jumps, just like you said.”

Five rolls his shoulders stiffly, pulling the air around him over his shoulders like a coat, disappearing and reappearing with a little _pop_ of displaced air.

“See?”

Their Father sighs, with what Seven thinks is a _startling_ display of patience - her knuckles still sting from the last time she spoke out of turn - putting his fork and knife onto his napkin and actually _addressing_ Five.

“A spatial jump is trivial when compared to the unknowns of time travel,” he says, sipping his wine. Her siblings all busy themselves with eating, book disappearing, Two sheathing his knife and flicking the slivers of his latest carving off the armrest. “One is like sliding along the ice, the other is akin to descending blindly to the depths of the freezing water, and reappearing as an acorn.”

Five thins his lips in an unfriendly smile. “Well, I don’t get it.”

“Hence the reason you’re not ready,” says Father. Subject closed, he picks up his fork and knife and resumes eating.

Five’s smile twitches. He looks across the long table - Seven frozen - and meets her eyes.

 _No_ , she shakes her head. _Sit down, Five_ _._

He works his jaw, gaze flickering away from her, turning back to Father. He makes the bad choice. “I’m not _afraid_ ,” he says.

Seven is. Eventually, even with Five, Father will lose his patience and the Academy will go quiet and dim as a mausoleum until he’s worked out his anger on the rest of them.

But he hasn’t lost his patience yet, saying “Fear isn’t the issue,” crisp even around his own mouthful of roasted veggies. “The effects it might have on your body, even on your mind, are far too unpredictable.”

Father’s nose twitches when he finishes, clicking his cutlery against his plate. A flinch rolls over the table, Five stands at the head with his hands jammed into the pockets of his shorts, unamused.

“Now, I forbid you to talk about this any more,” says their Father, and _that_ , that is the end of his patience. Seven catches Five’s eye, shaking her head, _Sit down, Five, or he will get angry._

Seven makes Father angry a lot. Five hasn’t yet realized it’s something to be feared.

For a second, Seven thinks he’s considering it. That he’ll sit and this will be over and it’ll be okay. Then his face crumples in a scowl and he turns on one heel, sharp and strides from the room.

“Number Five!” their Father barks. Five doesn’t turn back. Seven -

Freezes, halfway out of her seat, knees weak. 

“You haven’t been excused,” Father shouts at Five’s retreating back and Five is in so much trouble, he doesn’t even _know_ -

Seven’s out of her seat like a shot, taking after Five.

“ _Five!_ ” she screeches, catching up to him at the main exit. “Five, wait!”

“Seven,” he grins, catching her arm and dragging her down the steps. “Feeling brave?”

_Feeling brave? Five asks, flickering into her room with a mighty heave of the air, I stole some candies on our last mission, they’re supposed to be sour._

“No, she says again, letting Five drag her out of the gate. “We need to _apologize_ , and maybe Father might not be so _angry_ , Five - “

His cool fingers circle her wrist pulling her forward. His grin is a knife’s slash across his face. “Let’s try it,” he says, like it’s just a candy and he flicks his wrist and -

The air crumples around them like Seven’s face when the sour hit her tongue, crushing the air from her lungs, making her fingers tingle and then it _rolls_ over them and they’re out -

The heat of summer hits Seven’s face, blinking the sunlight out of her eyes. There’s an answering smile on her face to Five’s delighted laugh before she even realizes -

“Not ready my ass,” he crows, because they’ve _time traveled_. Together, his hand tight around hers, walking down the gritty sidewalk in the dead of summer.

“Five!” says Seven, a giggle rising in her throat. It’s hot enough that she already wants to shrug her jacket off, uncomfortable. “You did it!”

“Uh-huh,” he says, smug as a cat filching from the garbage. “Come on,”

He’s already pulling her forward, the pressure of the air crushing in on her, making Seven’s ears pop. It hurts like a stormfront ringing in her ears, and then it’s over, winter air biting at her eyelids.

How long is that, Seven thinks, a whole three seasons - four, since it was spring, almost a year gone. Five’s excitement is contagious as she jogs after him down the snow covered street, cold biting at her knees, her chin, her fingertips where they peek out between Five’s.

Five steels himself, power ripping blue around their joined fingers and -

Seven’s foot skids on a hidden slick of ice, _hell_ , and she stumbles -

The air squeezes over them both with force as she’s falling, Five half twisted around in surprise as, and he -

Lets go,

“ _Seven_ \- “

Seven’s knees never hits the concrete as she falls through the air, her lungs crushed flat under the weight of the infinite nothing, and she watches as Five winks through the air blue, his hand reaching back to her, fingers outstretched -

Reaching back as she tumbles through space and time, no room for a breath in her chest and he’s -

 _Gone_ , back in the real world -

Seven falls through the infinite nothing, alone.

\---

Time rolls off her back like molasses on a duck, clinging and sticky, and Seven’s knees strike concrete with a sharp _crack_.

She uses her first full breath of filthy city air to swear, twisting on her back so she can rub at her bruised knees. It’s never felt so good to just _breathe_ before.

Seven lays there until her knees stop stinging, until her chest stops hurting and her head stops spinning and she feels a little more like a person and not just choking fear in a body that can die. She lays there until she realizes that _ah_ , _it’s a little weird to lay down on the sidewalk_ , until she remembers that her skirt is probably riding up her thighs.

That’s why she tried to negotiate for shorts. Unbecoming of a lady or not, skirts just aren’t _practical_ , Seven thinks, blinking open her eyes to an orange sky.

It’s evening? Black clouds flicker and waver across the sky, falling snow - falling _ash_ -

The air doesn’t taste like pollution, Seven realizes, forcing herself to her elbows. It tastes like _fire_.

“Five?” Seven croaks, staring wide eyed at the ruined buildings, skeletal shells she sort of recognizes from staring out her window, “ _Five!”_

No one answers. Seven scrambles to her feet, swaying dizzily. Every building is torn to the foundation, bricks and debris piled by the road, cars crumpled and burned and twisted, and the air burns dry in her throat, ash floating like the snowflakes she had just left behind.

In the distance looms a twisted metal carcass. Seven staggers towards it, the remains of the Academy, the only building that she _knows_ -

Something crunches under her feet as she begins to run. Seven doesn’t look.

Even ruined - shattered, glass on the cracked sidewalk, exposed rebar jutting into the air like broken fingers, Seven knows the front entry to the Academy by the brick and mortar. The metal doors are twisted and half destroyed, the stairs are crumbling - and when she turns to look away, look at _anything else_ -

Everything is ruined and burning and broken

“Five!” she shouts again, facing the broken Academy. “ _Six?_ Answer me!"

There’s no reply but for the crackle of fire consuming the entire world.

\---

She makes herself move, eventually. Shoulders open the remains of the doors and forces her way into the shell of the Academy. It doesn’t feel so big now that it’s not towering into the sky; just rubble on the ground.

“Mom?” she calls. Mom’s an android. She’s built to survive things that would kill a person. Or, “Number One? Can anyone hear me?”

No one answers. Seven slowly walks over the ruined Academy, focused on her feet. She doesn’t want to roll her ankle on the loose cinder blocks and debris.

It’s why she doesn’t see the corpse until she’s practically stepping on it. Half buried under the dust and rubble is a dead man. 

“Oh,” Seven whimpers. He’s filthy, blood streaking down what may have been a handsome face, half his skull torn away, leaking blood and brain, blackening his light hair. She takes a step back, eyes locked on the gruesome injury - it must have been what killed him.

She hopes it was quick.

One of his hands is sticking up, like he’s reaching out to grab onto something - no, she realizes, there’s something held in his curled fingers. Seven takes a hesitant step forward - and, looking at the remains of his face, turns her back to him.

“ _Hell_ ,” Seven curses, fisting her tie in both hands. Her breathing has gone shaky, everything’s all blurry. “ _Hell_ ,”

She sits down as carefully as she can manage, shaking hard. Mom would make her take another dose of her pills, if she saw this, Seven thinks. Head between your knees Seven, even breaths.

Except she can’t breathe at _all_ , ice where her heart should be. She feels like she’s being squeezed in Five’s warp, but it’s just _fear_.

“F - Five?” she croaks, and no one answers. Seven pulls on her hair and curls into a smaller ball. _Breathe, idiot_.

It takes her a long time to stop shaking. Even longer to lift her head, face wet. Ash catches on her tears, leaking black off her chin.

The dead man is still dead. Seven staggers past him, across the loose rubble

He’s not the only dead body lying in the Academy’s carcass. A man and women lie smashed to jelly under cinder blocks, one of the endless fires creeping closer to their bodies. Another young man, his suit torn and blood stained is propped up uneasily where Seven thinks the sitting room may have been.

There’s a piece of rebar through the back of his neck at an angle, protruding out his eye. It leaves his upper body hanging in a mockery of sitting upright.

Seven knows these bodies. Seven doesn’t _want_ to know these bodies. She doesn’t look at what remains of their faces, stumbling through what may have been the kitchen. The body here lies with his shirt rucked up, a gaping chasm where there should have been a belly and chest.

“Six?” she asks, and keeps moving before she has the opportunity to check.

Four, though - and it must be Four, because what remains of his face tell her he’s a white man and neither One nor Five would wear yellow dress with a black fur coat - Four she recognizes. Recognizes the tattoo on his broken wrist, sleeve torn away, his head half gone from the debris forced through his _face_ -

The shaking _hurts_ this time, as Seven falls to her knees and begins to cry.

\---

Seven staggers through the remains of the town with part of her skirt tied over her mouth and nose. All the ash in the air - she shouldn’t be breathing that in. Mom made them all wear masks inside the year the wildfires drew close to the city, turning the sky a murky yellow even at noon.

The sky is red like old blood, and the air weighs down on her shoulders like a funeral shroud. Her torn skirt exposes too much of her legs, but at this point Seven would _welcome_ the humiliation of a stranger seeing her panties. 

There’s no one in the city at all. Just her.

And the corpses. Very few of them still have skin like her siblings did - most are charred up like burnt marshmallows held into a flame. Grease collects on her sweaty forehead from the burned up fat.

All the while, Seven cries black tears, ash and saltwater soaking her makeshift mask.

“Five?” she keeps croaking. “Mom? Six? Three?” it’s not on purpose. They’re dead. They’re _dead_. They’re dead, and so is everyone else.

Seven’s not sure how long it takes, but eventually she finds a building still half standing. It must have been tall, once, steel beams piercing the low hanging haze obscuring the heavens. Part of the second floor is still surviving, providing a crumbling, unstable roof.

Exhausted, Seven limps towards the building. Her head hurts, her chest aches. Her throat feels raw from the smoke and ash she’s still breathing in.

_What happened? Why is this happening to me?_

There’s a nook with a bit of carpet tucked behind some crumbling shelves. 

Seven curls up there, small as she can. The scratchy carpet is melted into weird slick patches and scratchy frizz.

 _Are you feeling brave_?

No, Seven _isn’t_ feeling brave. She wants to go back to the Academy, still standing. Wants the imposing brick and the ornate carvings no one is supposed to touch. She wants to lie in her bed, she wants Three to curl her lip at her, and Mom to make her cookies as a snack while she practices her scales.

She wants _Five_.

They jumped through time and she _slipped_ . Five got them through a whole _year_ , hand clamped around her wrist, and she couldn’t even trot after him without messing up. She slipped. She _fell_.

Is this what it means to be ordinary? Making mistakes?

Is this her punishment?

Seven clamps her hands over her skirt mask, and begins to sob.

She wants to go _home_.

\---

The next not-morning - sky still burning red, snowing ash and acrid death down on her - Seven makes herself uncurl from her half hidden nook and pokes around the building.

It must have been a library, she deduces. Some of the bookshelves are still mostly in one piece, and while plenty of the books are torn to confetti or burned to ash, there’s enough surviving that she assumes it must have been a _really big_ library. 

_Very good, Number Seven_ , she imagines her Father saying. But she can’t get the voice right - Father never spoke warmly to her.

Satisfied in her (big) library home base, Seven moves onto the next urgent bit of business -

Food and water.

She hasn’t eaten since lunch yesterday (?) when they jumped, and her stomach hurts. She’s thirsty, the dry, ashy air sucking all the moisture from her tongue.

Water first, she knows. She can live a lot longer on no food than she can without water. 

Then she’ll need a proper home base - a place to use the restroom, regular access to potable water, more clothes. She desperately needs a more effective ash mask if she doesn’t want to get pneumonia or lung cancer or _something_ . Breathing in particulates is _bad_.

She needs to - to stay alive, and stay in one place until help comes. That’s what she needs to do.

Five - _her_ Five - he’ll come for her. She knows he will. And then -

Then she can help everyone fix this! Which means after she’s figured out her living space, she needs to look for clues.

It’s just that -

Seven wasn’t allowed out of the Academy very often, unlike her siblings. On the rare occasions she _was_ allowed to venture out of grounds, she was rarely allowed to stray from Father’s side. 

Seven’s never had to look for a grocery store, before. She doesn’t really know where she is. And the city is made of dead and broken things now, so there’s no one to ask for help. There’s the odd squeak of rats, and the crackle of fire, and her footsteps. And that’s all.

She’s very alone. She clutches her shirt tighter across her chest and keeps walking.

The first water she finds isn’t in a store or hidden under rubble at all, as it turns out. She’s thirsty, with a tongue that feels twice as big as it’s supposed to be under her skirt scarf. A dead woman with charcoal bones wrapped tight around a dull aluminum bottle catches her eye; Seven picks her way over, and pokes at the bottle to hear the slosh. Still half full.

She feels very bad about it, glancing to the left and right for anyone who might see, but when she can’t pry the dead woman’s fingers off the bottle, she, well.

Well, Seven takes a piece of brick and breaks apart the woman’s charred up hand. The burnt bones are fragile; it’s not difficult.

The water is warm and kind of slimy and it’s the best water Seven has ever had. She drinks all that’s left, tucking the aluminum bottle under her armpit, thanks the woman’s still fleshy face, and keeps walking.

She’s hungry, and her head hurts, but she has to pee a while later. That’s good - she still remembers Herr Carlson lecturing them at means passively from the record player, _if one findself oneself stranded and happens upon a water source while suffering from exhaustion, you must drink first and wait until you have excreted water in the form of urine, as it is a sign the body is not so dehydrated as to be unwilling to lose more fluids._

She squats awkwardly behind a standing wall. She’d still gladly suffer the embarrassment of someone noticing her peeing in public, if it means there was another person alive in this wasteland with her.

But no one yells at her for being disgusting, so Seven continues on.

She follows the squeaking shrieks of furious rats to a vast area that’s utterly flattened to unstable rubble that ends up being a grocery store - the rats burrow beneath the debris, so Seven begins moving the heavy cinder blocks out of the way. There’s huge slabs of concrete that she tries to stay away from, and she kicks and swears at rats when they draw too close.

“Fuck you,” she spits, because no one at all can hear her so what does she care, if swearing isn’t allowed. “Fuck you, go away, _leave off_.”

The rats squeak and scrabble closer with their horrible little claws. Seven throws rocks and bricks at them, but there’s always _more._

But her digging unearths a trove of smashed fruit paste and dust, so she knows she’s in the right place.

\---

Meat is done for, at this point, and all the eggs are slime against brick. It’d be better, Seven thinks, if she stuck to perishables for the next few days, but all the perishables are smeared into the debris.

Instead, she finds a supply of reusable shopping bags which she loads with meal replacement drinks, granola bars, beef jerky - whatever packages she can find that aren’t ripped open or destroyed in some way.

She’s lucky - she’s also able to unearth dented packs of plastic water bottles. Enough water for - a while. Hopefully long enough for Five - _her_ Five - to come back for her.

She doesn’t set up camp on the flat patch of the decimated grocery store, because it’s all loose uneven rubble swarming with rats and vermin. There’s a semi - upright shop, a blue sign declaring it _Imp i l Wo war s_ still mostly in one piece about a block away that will do. It has part of a roof, and the ground is still flat and stable. It must be some kind of carpenters shop, because it’s full of broken furniture and weird carvings and knives, which are still in good condition. She uses a screwdriver to open a can of cold spaghetti, and eats it off her fingers.

She’s tired already, again. Her head aches, no matter that she eats until her stomach hurts and drinks steadily until she has to pee again. It must be the ash or the smoke - tomorrow, her priority will be finding new clothes and making a proper dust mask.

Except -

Overnight she starts shaking. Her hands curl into claws, and the shivers make her teeth hurt. The pain in her head feels like something is trying to burst out of her skull, heavy pressure, _pounding_ , every shake an icepick to her temple.

_What’s happening?_

“Mom?” she croaks to the dusty concrete floor. “Mom, what’s happening?” 

She doesn’t answer. No one answers.

Because Seven is _alone_.

\---

The shaking gets worse. She begins sweating until she soaks through her uniform - she ends up having to crawl out of it, damn being mostly naked outside.

She’ll take the humiliation - she’s so hot, then cold, then hot again that she wants to _die_ . She makes herself eat and drink even when she begins to puke it up in the corner of _Imp i l Wo war s_. She needs to stay hydrated, and she needs calories and energy. Her head hurts like something is trying to break out, or in, and she wishes she had looked for tylenol.

And then - 

Some time passes, and she knows it passes, and she doesn’t really know what happens, except that it’s miserable and eventually the sky stops snowing ash and the fires go out and she’s bleeding and hurting and _she wants her mom -_

It’s like a nightmare. Going to bed at nine, horrible things occur, and then it’s morning and it’s over.

It is over, isn’t it?

She needs more water. Her mouth tastes like blood and sand, and there’s grit between her teeth. There’s no skin on her knuckles, she’s missing two nails and the rest of them have blood and skin packed underneath. There’s bruises _everywhere_ on her legs, and she’s not sure where her socks went. Her face stings around her eyes - little scratches. _Imp i l Wo war s_ is a mess of blood and puke, and chewed up food paste that she didn’t eat, for some reason.

She was really sick, Seven concludes grimly. There’s two unopened bottles of water - and three open ones with murky red-black liquid inside - and some dry jerky left. She eats sullenly, even though she still doesn’t feel _well_ , head spinning, stomach lurching.

From the slimy water from the corpse’s bottle? Retribution for breaking her hand? Or just bad luck?

Seven’s not sure. She packs what’s left of her meager supplies into the reusable grocery bag, shoves her (bare, filthy, blistered) feet back into her shoes, rescues her shirt where it’s been wedged into some furniture -

No, she realizes, wrapped around a box. A _case_.

A violin case.

Seven stares at it until tears prickle at the corners of her eyes, burning like the fires that are now just ash.

“Okay,” she whimpers. “Okay.”

\---

Seven can’t find her skirt or her skirt-mask, but it’s not like breathing ash is a big concern any more. She staggers over to the grocery store again for supplies with her reusable bag, her blackened button up, her shoes, and her violin case.

It’s _her_ violin now. It’s not like there’s anyone else it can belong to anymore.

She collects more food from the flattened grocery store. There’s less rats, now. Probably ate everything they could get too - how _long_ was she sick? Days? Weeks?

She’ll need to do a better sweep, later. Look for paracetamol and multivitamins and tampons. Her pills she was supposed to take are prescription - she’s not _glad_ for the excuse not to have to take them, by any means, but she’s not going to hunt more down.

She needs a shower. Really, _really_ badly.

 _Priorities, Seven_ , Five would say, _What’s most important to stay alive?_

She’s got food and water for now… excavating the grocery store is her next project. But before she can do something like _that_ , she needs, in order, a new place to sleep, clothes, and information.

When her Five comes to get her, she needs to know what happened. Aside from _everyone died_.

That way, everyone _won’t_ die.

Her next sleeping spot is the remains of a little bookstore some two blocks from the grocery ruins. There’s enough surviving shelves that she can build a small fortress under the part of the building that still has a roof. Rats squeak only occasionally as she prepares her new home - Seven still suspends her grocery bag off a jutting piece of rebar.

Rats get into _everything_.

By the time she’s done dragging the shelves into place - inch by miserable inch across the debris strewn ground, stacking books as she goes - Seven is _exhausted_ . Her arms are shaking, and she’s breathing like Four would after an endurance sprint. Her vision swims. She spends two long minutes trying to balance _The Horror_ on her stack of books before she realizes that her hands are shaking and she can’t see.

“Hell,” Seven curses. And then, because she can, “ _Shit_.”

Giving up - for who is going to lecture her on her lazy character? - Seven crawls into her bookcase fortress, curling up on the hard, half melted carpet.

It’s cold.

Tomorrow, she’ll look for clothing. 

\---

“Okay, Seven,” Seven crows cheerfully. As cheerful as she can get in her little world of ash and brick and cinderblocks. “Today, we’re working on _pants_.

The bookstore ended up being a bigger project than she had thought it would. She had spent another two days rearranging the shelves to protect her from the wind, unearthing a back room with two dead women, rotting.

Seven stole the skirt off one, the rest of the clothes safely hidden in her little shelf-maze. She would prefer pants, though. Less likely to snag.

She has pens now, and paper. Enough water for a few more days and food for a few more than that. A real, proper home base. Even some of the books were going to be useful, on physiotherapy and how to properly lift weights, _Back to Basics_ , a heavy digest on traditional American skills (likely for camping, now for surviving) and a small collection of maps.

She needs to sort through the novels later, for when she’s less busy. Five is taking his time making it to the end of the world - likely, he doesn’t know exactly _when_ she is, searching for her through minutes and weeks.

She’s not sure what day she’s on precisely either, due to the bout of confusion from her fever. She _does_ know the day the world ended now, which must have been just before she arrived, the fires still burning.

April first, 2019. The newspaper had predicted mixed clouds. They had gotten hellfire.

The novels will have to wait until she’s gotten pants, though, and begun her investigation as to _why_ she’s - why the world ended.

Before she leaves her bookstore fortress, she writes a note on a page ripped out the back of a book about making artisanal pastries.

_NUMBER 7’S CAMP. DO NOT STEAL._

The skirt stolen off the corpse of the book store woman is too big for her - Seven has to keep hiking it up as she wanders through the filthy wasteland, holding it to her waist. Once she’s found pants, she’s going to turn the skirt into a blanket.

It’s spring now. Kind of chilly, but getting warmer. Hopefully Five will come for her before winter hits - she’ll have to prepare for that, if he doesn’t.

But that’s _months_ away. Five will find her before then, for sure.

According to her _map of amenities_ , there’s supposed to be a department store- _Gimbel Brothers_ \- not far from her book store. It takes Seven less than an hour to hunt down the flattened building.

“Yes,” Seven hisses, clapping her hands together, “ _Yes_ , success! I am so good at this.”

She can imagine Six giving her a little smile, _good job Seven_ , or Five raising his brow like _that took you all week?_ But it doesn’t hurt coming from him like it would from Three or One because Five is her _friend_ and he’d say it with a smile.

About half of the walls of the store are still sort of standing, but most of the clothes are buried under dust and rubble. They’ll be filthy, but that’s okay - Seven is sort of disgusting herself at this point. Her skin itches constantly and she can scrape grey sludge off her underarms with her nails.

“Okay,” Seven says out loud to herself. She’s been trying to speak more, since she startled herself a few days ago when she had belched loudly. Noise has become - very predictably dull and low and _quiet_.

It takes her a while to find the section of clothes appropriately suited to her size. Brightly coloured t-shirts caked through with grey cement dust, blue jeans that don’t have any pockets, sweaters that are rough and gritty to the touch.

There’s corpses here, too. There’s corpses everywhere.

There’s also - amusingly? Or terrifyingly? Seven can’t decide, but there’s mannequins.

“Don’t judge me,” she says to the bald mannequin staring absently in her direction as she strips out of her too-big Academy shirt, already losing weight across her chest and belly. The mannequin has a chip in her nose, and she’s missing an arm and both legs.

The mannequin doesn’t respond, staring blankly as Seven pulls on clothes in layers - _Layering is the key to survival if one knows they will spend much time out in variable conditions_ \- dressing herself.

She feels marginally better, after. She’d feel even better if she was clean. 

And - because her luck is looking up - the department store has _wet wipes_.

Seven blows through half a pack scrubbing herself clean-ish, and then digs for more, stuffing the packs into her grocery bag. Once she’s done excavating the grocery store, she’ll have to shift to the department store. And, she thinks, perking up, maybe a specialist shop for hunting, to get a proper tent and first aid supplies.

She is so clever. If she keeps having good luck like this, Seven thinks, Five will come to get her in the morning.

“Bye,” she shouts over her shoulder. “See you next time.”

The mannequins don’t answer.

\---

Seven draws the bow over the strings, a high, clear A sharp cutting through the bright night air. The sky is that odd, murky orange over purple that comes with smoke and light pollution, pressing down on the crown of her head like a sword hanging from a thread.

The bow swoops along the strings in the beginning of _Silent Night_ , cleaner and brighter than her violin back home. It’s a fine instrument, light and cool in her hands.

It feels odd to be playing to nothing. Not even the sounds of her siblings playing in some distant wing of the house. Seven is alone, her song heard only by the rats and the corpses of people who used to live.

She sniffs. Seven removes the violin from her chin before she can drip on it. Pogo liked to sit on her bed while she practiced, offering words of praise. She got enough criticism from Father. Five wasn’t a fan of violin on it’s own, but he liked it when she played softly as he studied. And Six always had new ideas for songs she could learn, no matter how often Seven insisted she preferred classical music.

Such a nice violin, and no one to listen to it.

\---

“Don’t judge me,” Seven says, brushing dust off the mannequin. “I just need someone to listen, you know?”

\---

It takes her - a while to return to the remains of the Academy. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to see her siblings, doesn’t want -

She’s _scared_.

It’s been - weeks. She’s already begun excavating the grocery store, starting at the pharmacy, marked out a few little niche shops she’s interested in for supplies. She just -

They’re grown up now, her siblings. It’s weird. Or - they _were_. They were adults and they were alive without her. Grown up and dead and turned to rat food, along with everyone else.

And Seven is the only one left alive.

 _How’s that for ordinary?_ She thinks.

But she does go back eventually. She needs to figure out how the world ends, so she can stop it. As soon as her Five finds her - as soon as she goes back. They’ll stop it.

“Right?” she asks. The mannequin belted to her back doesn’t answer, so Seven continues on her own, speaking in a posh little accent that Three found funny for the mannequin, “ _That’s right, Seven. They’re just corpses, nothing to be scared of_.”

Seven nods. “Okay, I agree. Let’s go!”

They step over the crumbling threshold to the Academy’s debris, shifting under her feet. Seven’s glad she was able to dig up a proper pair of laced hiking boots - her Academy flats were developing holes in the sole already.

The bodies are much worse off than they were the first time she came here. _Advanced decomposition_ , Herr Carlson’s voice notes drily in the back of her head. Skin black and dry, stretched across brittle looking bones. _Or is it still active - there’s still meat hidden under his overcoat._

She can tell because of the smell.

One - for he must be One, because she already knows where Four is and Five isn’t this blonde (the man in the… sitting room, was it? With the spike through his head, that’d be not-her-Five) - still has his skeletal hand upraised. In his brittle fingers is -

“An eye?” Seven doesn’t want to break One’s fingers, which means she has to actually _touch_ his body, working the glass eye out from between his fingers. It’s covered in black residue - blood and flesh.

“Gross, gross, _gross_ ,” Seven complains, working the eye free. “ _You can do it Seven_ ,” she says for the mannequin, because _hell_ , she’s _trying_ , and could someone - _anyone_ \- recognize it?

The eye is gross and bloody, but it’s a clue. “Five will want this,” she tells the mannequin, holding it up over her shoulder so the mannequin can see. “If One had it in his hand - he must have removed it from someone’s skull shortly before the world ended. So! The owner of the eye must know something about the end of the world.”

“ _You’re so smart, Seven_ ,” Seven trills on behalf of the mannequin, picking through the wreckage. “ _That’s very clever, I’m sure your Father will be impressed_.”

“Except Father is never impressed,” Seven adds. “But thank you.”

Three and Four, who had been bone jelly when she first arrived due to blunt force trauma have already become bone soup. Seven doesn’t recognize her siblings in their bodies at all. She still pokes around at the dry remains, looking for anything they may have been holding onto.

Gross.

“Two was always mean to me,” Seven tells the mannequin. “Most of the time. He wanted to be One, you know? The leader? And I was the weakest link.”

She stares at his exposed spine. “I wish he was here to tease me,” Seven says. “He’d know how to survive this, until Five came. Even if he was a big bully.”

They move on. She finds not-her-Five impaled in the sitting room, like she thought. He’d been in a fight, Seven thinks. Someone was trying to hurt him. 

“They must have known it was coming,” Seven muses. “So… we need to get back! With a little bit more help, we can stop this. Right?"

“ _Right_ ,” she trills for the mannequin. “ _We just need to stick together until your-Five comes for us_.”

“Of course,” Seven agrees with the mannequin. “He just needs more time.”

\---

Neither Six nor Four’s corpses reveal anything interesting. Four is as decayed as the rest of them, nibbled on by rats and bugs. Seven hasn’t seen a bird or cat or bunny since she came to this time.

It seems odd that Four’s body would be so - dead. Seven’s not sure why, but it makes her jaw ache.

“Four?” she asks, looking up at the still-hazy sky. “Are you listening? Are you a ghost, too, now? Can you see me?”

But no one answers.

“ _Don’t worry, Seven,_ ” she vocalizes for the mannequin. “ _Your-Five will be here soon and then this will all be over_.”

But he doesn’t arrive just then, so Seven stands up and begins shifting rubble from the courtyard into a pile, clearing out a hole. 

It’s exhausting, dirty work, and there’s no promise of food or new clothes at the end of it. Still, Seven returns the next three mornings and stays until nightfall, clearing out a grave for each of her siblings in the remains of their home.

One she’s done - once she has six graves for each of the six siblings that she doesn’t know anything about, Seven steels herself to the sheer disgust of touching their corpses and drags them into their graves.

Seven’s learning a lot about the things she can survive doing. Going without a proper bath for a month, soaking wet wipes in alcohol to reuse. Digging out a latrine away from where she sleeps. Playing to an audience of rats and a plastic woman. Digging in filth and rotted food to look for something to eat that won’t make her lose her calories on the brick and debris. All of that she can do.

She really doesn’t want to put her hands on her sibling’s bones. They deserve a place to rest, though, so she makes herself survive that, too.

There’s a corpse that she doesn’t touch, though, burned so black that it’s unrecognizable. It’s made of charcoal through and through - she can see the debris the body is lying on through a hole in its chest.

The body makes her nervous. Seven walks in circles around it, because it’s odd and strange and she _doesn’t like it_.

It must be evil, Seven thinks.

It must belong to the person who ended the world, Seven thinks.

Whoever it was doesn’t deserve a resting place, Seven thinks.

She leaves the body exposed in the Academy’s ruins, and finishes burying her siblings. She marks the graves with loose rebar jutting up, closer to their head than their feet. That way she’ll know which order she buried them in. One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.

And Seven, she thinks, will stay close by. Waiting for someone to find her.

\---

“Things I miss,” Seven muses. “Clean clothes. Hot water. Fluffernutters. Moms cookies. Talking to Five. Talking to Six. Sleeping in a real bed. Television! Pogo’s compliments. Hugs.”

She picks at the buttons of her dirty green shirt. “Speaking to people. Looking out the window. I miss Five. and Six. And Four. And Three and Two and One. Mom and Pogo. I want them back. I want to go back. Five, where are you?”

\---

She continues excavating the grocery store. She starts drinking flat, warm soda to spare her reserves of clean water. She eats peanut butter on marshmallows and aches deep in her chest. She reads up on proper lifting techniques for heavy objects, how to treat her blistered and cracking feet, how to deal with sunburn and heat exhaustion, how to build a shelter and collect rainwater and repair clothes and -

How to do a lot of things, really. She sets up drums to collect the rain, which is _not_ safe to drink - distinctly acidic and unpleasant - and hoards aloe vera and vinegar and polysporin. When it begins to be proper _summer_ , she takes one of the carpenter's knives from _Imp i l Wo war s_ and hacks her long hair into a ragged bob. She’s covered in a greasy layer of sunscreen all the time, because it’s _hot_ , and dresses in loose, light layers that are always closer to black than white by the time she changes. Even working baby powder and baking soda into the cloth can only help so much.

Her bookshelf fortress has been replaced with a proper tent, and she has a solar powered lamp that’s still functioning for her nighttime exploits. She builds a proper nook for important, fragile things - the eye, her collection of pens, a pretty button,

Slowly, Seven becomes a bit hardier and more muscular, loses what little fat she had. She can walk longer distances now than when she first was dropped here, doesn’t tear up at a skinned knee or bruised shins.

Her shins are black and purple and bloody all the time now. She trips a lot on the loose debris. Clumsy, clumsy Seven.

Bathing and laundry is somewhat hampered by the fact that when it rains, it rains black. Ash or something trapped high up in the sky - her sky is never blue, always some kind of hazy yellow or threatening red. She scrubs herself down with alcohol-soaked wet wipes until the cloth disintegrates, washing her hair with vinegar, and just getting used to a base level of smelly discomfort.

The books - especially _Back to Basics_ and _An Introduction to Disaster Management; the Prepper’s Handbook_ \- are lifesavers. When she’s bored, she plays the violin to her audience of one, makes plans to build a proper little house (maybe with a well? But she’d have to leave the city for that, and she doesn’t want Five to think she’s somewhen else), or begins reading through the novels.

There’s only so much survival she can handle.

She sticks to fluffy books at first. Adventures and romances that always end well. Seven wants a happy ending - wants someone to come for her, sweep her off her feet and take her to safety. She reads the books aloud to her mannequin, because she needs to speak and listen to something other than the rats snuffling around her camp. Sometimes, she speaks in her mannequin’s voice, and pretends that she’s being read to.

Days crawl by, and Five never comes. Seven grows frustrated with how unrealistic the books are - no one ever sweats, or uses a latrine, or menstruates. The fate of the world hangs in the balance, sure, but no one ever needs to just _survive_.

She switches to nonfiction. Mom was teaching them about Maya Angelou’s poetry - Seven devours her autobiography over the course of two days after she twists her ankle excavating clear alcohol to use for disinfecting her blistered feet and torn knees.

Seven likes autobiographies, as it turns out. Listening to people try to piece together their life years after they’ve already survived the hard parts. She thinks she wants to write one, too, and starts keeping a journal.

_Today I ate an entire thing of Oreos because I wanted to, and the sugar made my tongue hurt._

_Today the mannequin and I marked out a second grocery store to start collecting more water. Mom said that three million people lived in our city back in my correct time - there must be plenty of grocery shops buried here._

_Today we began repairs on the bookstores walls - I'm going to turn it into a proper home with a roof. Back to Basics is good, but I’ve also been looking for more specialized textbooks on construction._

_Today Five didn’t come. Maybe tomorrow._

It’s in hunting for more autobiographies that Seven finds _The Horror_. Finds it again, rather.

“Ben Hargreeves,” she says, turning it over in her hands. “The author had the same surname as Dad?”

Except when she reads the introduction, the first line is _My name is not Ben Hargreeves. My name is Number Six, because I was not a person to the man I called my Father_.

A shock goes through her lungs. “Six,” Seven breathes.

Six wrote an autobiography. Seven bites her lip, flipping back to the chapter index - they’re titled.

_Chapter one: The Umbrella Academy_

_Chapter two: Daily Life in the Academy_

_Chapter three: Our Mother_

She turns the page.

_Chapter seven: Our Missing Sister_

Seven breathes out. A chapter about her. Six wrote about her in a book about his life.

Perhaps it’s selfish, but Seven skips to chapter seven. She’ll read about Six and the others later - she wants to know when she got back home. She _really_ isn’t looking forward to the winter, but she’ll survive it if she has too.

_Chapter seven: Our Missing Sister._

_You may think that the Umbrella Academy is six members large, consisting of myself, my four brothers, and our one sister. After all, it was the six of us who stood before the bank that first day, and it was the six of us that would stand before you everyday after that. When my Father prepared press releases, he, too, would refer only to his six extraordinary children._

_But it is not the whole truth - the Umbrella Academy may have been six members large, but Reginald Hargreeves purchased seven infant children._

_Number Seven was a quiet, unassuming girl. She had the makings of a violinist, talented and disciplined even as a child. I cannot tell you her aspirations or dreams; Seven was discouraged from having any._

_Unlike the rest of us, she had no special powers, no extra-human abilities. When I was a child, I thought she was lucky. She was excluded from the harsh training regimes, the constant danger, the gore and blood and fear. It is only as I got older that I realized how crushing the isolation must have been; I cannot recall a time where Seven ever laughed._

_Our Father was not kind to her. Neither, I must confess, were we. I regret that now._

_Unlike the rest of my siblings, to tell you about Seven I will start not from my earliest memories, but a particular day when we were thirteen years old, a few months after the Umbrella Academy went public. Remembering back to write this chapter, it was this day that coloured every single memory of her._

_The day Seven disappeared was a bland one of no particular interest before our lunch. I cannot tell you what we were studying that morning, I cannot tell you what book I was reading at meals, though I surely was. Atticus, more prone to arrogance than the average teenager and by far the best at controlling his abilities at that point in time, started a row with our Father about his desire to time travel. Father said no, Atticus claimed he could control it. When Father lost his temper, Atticus left the table unexcused. This has happened before. It would happen again._

_Unusually, Seven ran after Atticus._

_This is the last time I would ever see my sister._

The pages crumple under Seven’s grip. Eyes burning, she keeps reading.

_As Atticus tells it, Seven ran after him, took his hand, and the two successfully time travelled. You may recall a period of time where Atticus (or, Number Five as he continues to be best known by the media) was mysteriously absent. The truth is this - Atticus and Seven jumped through time. What was for us a period of eight months, was to Atticus only seconds._

_Atticus and Seven warped twice. While preparing for a third warp, Seven slipped on a patch of ice. This is normal. I don’t think anyone reading this book can say they’ve never tripped and dropped something fragile, or bruised their shins._

_The consequences of a minor mistake fell upon Seven, and Seven alone. When she fell, Atticus accidentally lost his grip on her hand. He cancelled the time jump, but it was too late. He had already pulled them into a space outside of linear time, and without a connection to Seven, he could not bring her back with him_

_So when Seven fell and he cancelled the jump, she did not land as he had, comfortably back on the wintery street. Seven remained in neutral time alone, and completely unable to help herself._

_Atticus returned to the Academy in a panic and explained what had happened once he realized what had just happened. Father praised him for jumping through time, and informed Atticus that the death of Seven was surely his fault for his arrogance._

_You may wonder why I refer to Seven solely by her number - it is because at the time of her death, we had not been given names. Indeed, I cannot help but wonder if Father had waited until after Seven had been removed from the house before allowing our Mother to choose our names._

_I thought about posthumously bestowing her a name for this chapter, before deciding that would be disingenuous. Seven and I were not that close as children. I don’t have the right to fix the narrative in that manner - we were children, and children do as they’re told. We were told that Seven was nothing interesting, and so she wasn’t. I did not question this._

_Lacking the ability to make things right now, I shall refrain from placating my own ego by misinterpreting events at her expense. Seven died without a name. She would never be given one._

_Father made no move to recover or remember Seven. It was impossible to know what affect remaining in Atticus’s warp would have on a little girl - likely, he said, she suffocated or died of thirst. There was no funeral, nor memorial. I never protested this, because I knew Father would never acquiesce and it didn’t seem worth the trouble. I’m not sure if the rest of my siblings felt the same, or if they simply didn’t care._

_Atticus was the sole hold out. Unlike the rest of us, he accepted the lack of funeral because he did not believe Seven was truly dead. He still does not. I said before that I accepted Father’s words about Seven’s insignificance because I was a child - perhaps that is too kind to myself. Atticus and Seven were close. Atticus never believed Seven was simply ordinary or insignificant. Seven brought out his soft side, and he brought out her mischief. They were as close as two children growing up under our Father’s untender lack of mercy could be._

_Being given the sole responsibility of her death broke something in him._

_But that can wait for my chapter on Atticus._

_I would have liked to include a tangible memory of Seven here; perhaps a photograph, so that she would be remembered by everyone who reads this chapter. However, no pictures were ever taken of Seven prior to her death - she was always forbidden from participating in family events, including group photos or the pretentious portrait sittings. I know she had long brown hair, and brown eyes. I could not tell you what she looked like beyond that. She was known only to us, and then she was gone._

_She was forgotten._

_Seven’s only crime was not being interesting to a man who wanted a legacy of extraordinary puppets that responded perfectly to his every command. She was not a burden, she was a child that happened to be a unique individual, not matching up to our Father’s demands. That she died was a tragedy, not inconsequential, not a relief._

_But that is how she was treated._

_And for that, there is no apologizing._

_Now that you understand how my sister died, let me explain to you how she lived: quietly, and under our Father’s crushing fist._

Seven throws the book at the wall with a yell.

\---

It storms for three days straight after Seven puts down Six’s book. She can’t read it - doesn’t want to finish his chapter full of apologies to a dead girl that isn’t her. Seven lays in her tent, clutching her mannequin to her chest, and cries.

 _I’m not dead, I’m not dead, I’m not dead_.

The sky cries with her. Lightning splits across the clouds with fury and thunder cracks like a sob, rain hits the ruined earth and soaks everything in acidic tears. 

Seven doesn’t want to stay here. Seven doesn’t want to have to survive here, forever. Seven is so, _so_ afraid. This world is hard, and painful, and _empty_.

Where is her Five? Why isn’t he coming? Why isn’t anyone coming to save her?

She’s here, and she needs help.

_Are you feeling brave?_

Seven wants to go _home_ . She’s still alive. She’s _waiting_ , and she’s _alive_.

Someone, anyone, please come and find her.

\---

_Today, I decided to keep living._

\---

Seven picks up the book again, eventually. She doesn’t turn to chapter seven, leafing through to chapter fifteen: _Atticus, Five, the Boy._

Six said Five kept looking for her. Maybe he’s still looking.

He is. He _was_.

_Atticus has never again travelled forward through time. Travelling backwards, unfortunately, remains impossible, and as such Atticus has not been able to prevent Seven’s death from happening in the first place. However, he has continued to use his ability to navigate time in a non-linear fashion in an attempt to find Seven. It’s confusing, I know. Let me put it simply -_

_It is impossible to know how old Atticus is, because Atticus has spent an indeterminate amount of time between moments. Searching for Seven in neutral space, where he left her._

_Atticus continues to search for her to this day. Perhaps one day, I will be able to publish that photo of Seven after all._

“Look,” she says, poking the copyright date with her index finger. “Six published this in 2014. The world hadn’t ended until 2019. That’s five whole years for Five to keep searching for me.”

Her mannequin stares at Six’s book impassively.

“He said Five was still looking,” Seven explains. “So he must have found me after _The Horror_ was published.”

The mannequin doesn’t respond.

“I guess it’s Atticus, now,” Seven frowns. “Everyone got names. I don’t have a name, I’m just Seven. And there’s no one to use a name for me, anyway. Oh, but I could use a name for you, I guess. Instead of just _The Mannequin_. What do you think?”

“ _That’s a great idea,_ ” Seven trills for the mannequin. “ _I’d like a name_.”

Seven pauses. “Me, too. But I’ll get one when I get back home, like Six said. So, for now, we just need one for you. Something classy - you strike me as kind of French? Kind of 1920’s? It’s the polka dots.”

The mannequin slips a little down the wall. Seven curls her arm around the mannequin’s shoulder, pulling her against her side.

“Any preferences?” she asks. The mannequin doesn’t indicate one way or another, so Seven settles in to think.

\---

“Francine?”

\---

“How about Maevis?”

\---

“Dorothy? No… but I think we’re getting closer.”

\---

“Deanna? No, I agree. I don’t like it either.”

\---

Repairing the bookshop and stockpiling resources becomes her first priority. Seven doesn’t know how long she’s going to have to survive in this time, and she’s going to need a proper house if she’s going to make it through the winter. She needs insulation, protection from the snow and the cold.

It’s during a trip to a grocery site, stacking pallets of water bottles on a red wagon with a crooked back wheel that Seven settles on her mannequin’s name. 

“Dolores,” she says, and it just sounds right. “You’re Dolores, and you’re my friend now, okay? Only real people get names.”

Dolores doesn’t say anything, but Seven thinks her painted smile is just that little bit more genuine.

Seven heads back to the big library to look for books on construction, proper textbooks. Bricks and broken wooden boards are plentiful and easy to find, if in broken pieces. Seven marks down the location of Home Depot on her map of local amenities and digs through the rubble looking for something she can use to seal all the pieces of her repair together.

If they make it through the winter, her priority is going to have to shift to gardening and a regular water source. She may be good using bottled water for _now_ \- it was a big city after all - but eventually she’ll run out.

And it would be nice to bathe. 

“Right, Dolores?” Seven asks, hitching Dolores higher up her back. “I bet you’ll feel better when we get all the dirt off… maybe change your shirt?”

For warmth, they build a second wooden (mostly - Seven cheats a bit) floor above the thin carpet of her book shop. It’s not pretty, but it gets them off the ground. Every book on surviving outdoors is clear - Seven needs to get off the ground, so it can’t suck the heat from her bones.

The roof and the walls are another matter entirely. Seven is fortunate that the big library had a few surviving books on engineering - the projects are a little too grand and use more equipment than she has available, but the basic principles are there. She details the process in her journal, step by step, mistake by mistake. 

_Today I smashed my fingers with a hammer._

_Today Dolores and I went hunting for scrap again. Finding wood that’s still structurally sound and long enough to use is more difficult than I thought. I don’t want to leave the city limits to look for trees - it would take days and I don’t have a cart to transport the wood. Would trees have survived, if buildings didn’t?_

_Today, I unearthed a bunch of broken tiles. The shards are pretty. The hunt for sealant continues. Note - lost three nails from the hammer incident. Wonder if they’ll grow in crooked like the two from my delusions?_

The weather is well and truly starting to turn but the time she’s turned her bookshop into a little shack. It’s probably not yet her birthday, but Seven and Dolores still celebrate with smashed up Doritos and warm apple juice, and begin hanging blankets from the walls for insulation. They don’t carpet the floors, opting to set up an indoor fire pit in a metal dish. They’re going to need it. The flap in the roof isn’t easiest to open, Seven fudged a bunch of the measurements, but it’ll do to let the smoke out. It’s by no means _safe_ or _up to code_ , but it will have to do. Maybe next year Seven can try to find an actual fireplace.

They hoard resources. Food, water, scrap wood, books too torn to read, heavy clothing. Everything Seven might need to stay alive.

Seven sets up her tent in the little shack as an extra precautionary measure. A bit more wind resistance, a bit less heat loss. Every little bit helps.

Curled up in her sleeping bag, Dolores in her arms, Seven feels like maybe things are going to be okay.

\---

Winter hits.

\---

There’s a point where cold stops feeling like a bodily sensation, a chill, and more like an assault. A point where the air causes her saliva to crystallize in her mouth, where needles of glassy ice form in the fluids between her joints, where clothing can’t keep her warm because there’s no heat to insulate. Seven wakes up blind some mornings because her eyelashes have frozen together.

The fire, everburning anemic in the pit, can’t chase out the cold. It’s oppressive, it hunts down all the cracks in Seven’s shoddy construction and sneaks into her tent. She has a bucket in the corner for waste that she empties as infrequently as possible, because the wind makes her skin blister and blacken. Even chewing is an exhausting effort in the oppressive weight of the cold, and Seven shakes the days away.

Her water is frozen. Her food is frozen. Everything gets put in a tin and held over the fire before it’s remotely something she can put into her mouth. She was hoping she’d be able to melt the snow for water, but even on the rare occasions she pokes her head outside, Seven never collects any. The snow is grey with ash and stinks of ammonia.

Half the time she’s too exhausted and hungry to read. The other half she spends in piecemeal efforts at getting through Six’s autobiography without crying. 

Dolores leans against her when she does, the sound of her sobs lost to the howling of the wind.

She’s so cold. She wants this to be over. She wants to go _home_.

“Where is he?” she asks the floor, the walls, Dolores’s smooth, kind face. “Why has no one come yet? Why am I still here?”

_Are you feeling brave?_

\---

“Warm weather. Hugs. The sky. The rain. Feeling okay. Feeling safe.” Seven inhales “Being safe. Sour candy. Hot food. People, _shit,_ I miss other people. Five? Five, where are you?”

\---

Seven can count her ribs one by one. She can see her heartbeat through her bust. She stops getting her period entirely by the time the winter stops howling and settles into a low, sustained scream.

Seven screams with it.

The four walls of her shack are saving her life. They’re also driving her to madness. Seven wants _out_ . She wants out , she wants _out_ , let her _out -_

“You’ll freeze to death,” Dolores says through her mouth.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” Seven snarls. Pacing, stalking the four walls of her cabin, each footstep a trembling triumph. The eye is heavy in her hand, frigid glass stealing the heat from her fingerbones. She wants to throw it at a wall, or swallow it whole. “No one is coming for me, anyway.”

“You don’t know that,” Dolores chides. “There’s five years unaccounted for after Six’s book was published. Someone will come.”

No one does.

\---

She plays the violin to a duet of shrieking snowstorms. She talks to Dolores. She reads to Dolores. Dolores reads to her. They play tic tac toe on the walls of the cabin and Seven doesn’t cry because the tears freeze to her face if she does, and it hurts.

“I want to go home,” she tells Dolores. “I want to go home, where’s Five, where’s Five, I don’t want to be here anymore, let me go _home-_ “

\---

Spring, unlike her rescuer, arrives in a timely manner. The blizzards quiet from a scream to a roar to a whisper. Seven can speak without her spit turning to ice in her mouth. Slowly, her water bottles begin to sweat condensation, which Seven licks off the bottles.

 _I am not brave_ , she writes in her journal. _I am not brave, I am not brave. Someone will come for me_.

She begins venturing out from the cabin in longer and longer stretches. Her fingers stop resembling sausages and start working again, and she regains the ability to taste. Gradually, winter thaws from her bones, and Seven begins to warm.

It’s nice to be able to pee in the latrine instead of a bucket. So that’s… something. Seven will take it, because she’s helpless to do anything else.

Everything floods when the snow begins to melt. The streets are full of slushy water that floods her boots; cold enough to give her blisters, or maybe it’s the acid content. She loses the ability to walk for weeks while her skin turns black and peels off.

It’s _excruciating_. Seven cries for three weeks straight, until her head hurts more than her feet do.

 _I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home_.

Seven closes the journal. “Such a whiner,” she chides herself. “Five is coming. Hang on.”

She gets better, she excavates for food, for clothes, she begins repairing her shack. She changes Dolores’s shirt for one with sparkly sequins, since it’s glitzy and glamorous and not something Seven wants for herself, but also can’t bear to throw away.

“Don’t worry,” Seven vocalizes for Dolores. “I like sequins.”

 _Today, I visited my siblings_.

“So you’re Luther,” Seven says to Number One, touching the rebar gently. It’s hard to see the outlines of where she had covered the graves, now. She’s glad she marked them, so she could come back here.

“Luther Hargreeves,” she tastes it on her tongue. “That’s a good name, I guess. Very soldier-boy type. _Luther_. It’s good, I like it. Did you ever get to go to space? Six didn’t say so, so I guess not. I hope you get to go to space now, though. That would be - something. I don’t think it would be worth it.”

She nudges Number Two’s jagged rebar. His had the sharpest edge. “Diego,” she says, “Diego Hargreeves.” she pauses.

“You were really mean sometimes,” she says. “I didn’t like it. _But_ ,” she allows. “I’d rather have you here than One - than Luther, I mean. At least your smell would scare off the rats. Not that _I_ smell very good anymore.”

And then, quietly. “I miss you,” she admits. Two had a stutter - she wonders if Diego kept it? A flaw, just like her whole self. “Even though you were mean.”

Three’s rebar is cold under her fingers. Seven’s so tired of wearing gloves - her fingertips are always frigid and her palms are always sweaty. 

And she wants to feel her siblings’ memorials properly.

“Allison,” Seven pronounces the word all posh, wrinkling her nose. That’s Dolores’s voice, now. “Allison,” she says normally. “Allison Hargreeves. Six said you were famous. I hope you were happy that way. All eyes on you. Was it what you wanted?”

“I cut my hair,” Seven says, touching the stiff ends of her bob. “You would have done a better job.”

Four’s grave is cold and unsettling. Seven still doesn’t like that he’s dead. That’s wrong - it’s not right at all.

“Hi, Klaus,” Seven nudges his rebar with her knuckles. “Klaus _Hargreeves_. Or did you change your last name to something silly, like Six said you were thinking about? I don’t know. Hi. Can you see me? Can you hear me? I hope you’re not scared of ghosts anymore. That would be awkward.”

“I bet there are a lot of ghosts, now.” Seven spreads her hands wide. “ _So_ many. I kind of wish I could see them. I’m really lonely, Klaus.”

Seven stands at the foot of Five’s grave. “Atticus,” she says. “What happened to James? I guess it’s not _Quentin_. But really, Five - Atticus? Atticus Hargreeves? That’s a romance novel name.”

Seven inhales, pushing her lower lip out. “I’m waiting for you,” she says. “When are you going to come and get me? I’ll tell you the rest then.”

“Hi, Ben,” she says. “Why Ben? Why not something cool? Ben Hargreeves is a grandpa name. I object. You should have gotten something much cooler. Like - uh. I don’t know, Dolores is pretty good but it took me like three weeks. I don’t think I’m cut out for naming.”

Seven sniffs. “I think I miss you most. Well - Five - Atticus, I miss him the most, because he could get me home. But I miss you second-most.”

“I just want to say,” Seven trails of. She shakes herself, forging ahead. “I just want to say, I forgive you. It’s okay. You said forgetting me was unforgivable - it’s not. It’s _okay_ , Ben, because you didn’t forget. You wrote about _me_. And - and when I get back home - we’ll make it right, okay? I promise.”

“Okay,” she says, stepping back. “Okay, I’m going to go keep myself alive now, okay? You just - “ Seven swallows heavily, swiping at her cheeks. The graves of her siblings are as empty as the rest of the world. “You just - don’t take too long, coming for me, okay? I don’t want to stay here.”

\---

“Hugs. Chocolate. Mom. Pogo. My siblings. Other people. Birdsong. Dogs.”

\---

It gets hot. Seven gets sunburned, and it hurts to move for _days_ until she sheds her skin like a lizard. Dolores thinks it makes her look like a dragon, and Seven runs around in the cabin roaring and holding princess Dolores captive.

The sky turns blue, finally. The heavy cloud cover begins to abate some days, the rain that comes down doesn’t blister her face. Seven starts boiling it and collecting the runoff steam - still not good to drink, but she can _bathe_ now. Laundry, suddenly, becomes a part of her routine.

She goes out to the graves and cuts her hair while sitting with her back against Allison’s rebar memorial, narrating the process like she thinks Allison might have. Except maybe a little less mean. She cuts it shorter, this time.

_Today, Dolores and I were out scavenging when we found plants. Plants! Growing through the cracks of the sidewalks. The green surprised me - I had forgotten how beautiful dandelion leaves were._

She gains weight back. She squeezes her tummy fat, happy, and performs a little fashion show for Dolores. Her period returns, and Seven decides to just wear the same pair of pants for a week over stuffing rags in the crotch. She starts researching how to set snares, except all that crawls around the dead city is rats.

Is she willing to eat rats?

Seven twists her mouth. There’s a lot she’s willing to do to survive, apparently. She just hopes she doesn’t have to survive too much longer. She wants to go home.

“You’ll like home,” she tells Dolores. “We can get you a new blouse for every day in a week. Or even a _month_.”

“That sounds nice,” Dolores muses.

It gets cold again. Seven is more prepared for it, ready to trap herself inside like a turtle slowly going mad. She survived last year mostly intact. She can do it again.

_Today, no one came for me._

_Today, no one came for me._

_Today, no one came for me._

It’s not quite as cold, this time. The snow falls a pristine white, and Seven sometimes sticks her head out of the cabin just to _stare_.

She scratches at the walls while it snows, and plays a duet with the storms. Howling wind, howling violin.

It gets hot. It gets cold. Seven learns that packaged food expires, and learns it painfully. Dolores soothes her while she shakes. 

Fresh rat meat is delicious. Dandelion heads. Pansy flowers. 

She practices the music she knows on her beautiful violin, singing through the air. She practices music she doesn’t know, swooping the bow along the strings in discordant and joyful glee. The only person to hear is Dolores, and she is generous with her praise for Seven’s ugly and patchwork solos.

Seven survives. It gets cold. It gets hot.

 _Today, I’m still alive_.

Seven and Dolores scale the remains of a building that’s no good for scavenging one balmy summer night. The stars glitter above them like a dark diner table covered in spilled salt. The moon is jagged and cracked and broken, just like the world below.

“Atticus and I used to watch the stars like this,” Seven says. She still wants to say _Five_. Atticus feels like a lie on her lips, a man she doesn’t know.

But that’s who Five became.

She wonders if he’ll come for her.

She’s not sure any more.

Seven clears her throat. “Atticus had no patience for astronomy,” she says. “Stars were useful when folk were navigating near-blind, but they’re just pretty now, he’d say. Unless you wanted to be an astronomer, Seven? And I’d say no, because I wanted to be a concert violinist. I just think they’re pretty.”

Seven swallows. Her eyes hurt. “So we’d make up stories,” she says instead of _where is he?_ “Like, look. See those ones, where I’m pointing? Don’t they make a lopsided Five? I’d say, there’s you!”

“We should make our own constellations,” Dolores says.

And Seven smiles. “That’s a lovely idea.”

\---

It gets cold. It gets hot.

\---

They keep watching the stars. Seven hadn’t realized how much she missed them until they returned, a bit of normalcy. Something she used to do with her favourite person, now again with a new favourite person.

She wants Atticus. But lying here, with Dolores below the fractured moon? It’s good. She’s happy here.

“I think that one suits you,” says Seven, tracing the line of stars she favours. It’s a jagged shape, a V on one end with an M on the other side. “It’s - cute.”

Dolores laughs. “Seven, you do realize that’s a heart?”

Seven flushes.

“Or are you doing this on purpose?” Dolores teases. “Are you saying you like me?”

“ _Shut up,_ ” Seven laughs, sitting upright. “So mean. I was just - saying. It reminded me of you.”

“Flirt,” Dolores says.

“Maybe,” Seven admits. _You can do it, Seven_ . _It’s been five years, you can do this._ “Are you saying - you wouldn’t like that?”

“I’m not saying _that_ ,” Dolores sways in the wind. She’s so light, Seven is thinking about filling her chest with rocks to protect her from tumbling away when Seven isn’t there to take care of her. Seven’s strong enough now that it wouldn’t matter. “Maybe you should come here?”

“Oh?” Seven pauses, then rolls onto one hip, leaning above Dolores. _Too forward?_ “Like this?”

But Dolores doesn’t seem to mind, murmuring “Closer,”

Seven ducks her head, so her breath fans over Dolores’s perfect face. “Like this?”

“Closer,” Dolores’s painted grin is so close to Seven’s. Not close enough. “You _tease_.”

“Well, maybe I just want to be a gentleman.” Seven says.

She cuts off Dolores’s next complaint with a kiss.

\---

“Hugs,” Seven whispers. “Other people.” Clutching Dolores to her chest is enough to live on.

\---

Now that the rain is clean enough to bathe in and even drink (albeit, _after_ she’s boiled it), Seven and Dolores begin enjoying rainy day walks in the summer.

Seven likes the feeling of rain on her cheeks.

She’s a little braver now. It’s been seven winters since Seven came to the end of the world. She is twenty years old. Soon, she’ll be twenty one, and then she can legally drink the clear alcohol she’s been hoarding since she was thirteen.

Seven doesn’t actually like alcohol that much. Dolores says it makes her weepy, which it does. A lot of things make Seven weepy. Ben’s book. Dandelions. Cold weather. The sound of her violin. Waking up in the morning after a night below the stars, sunlight across Dolores’s nose.

 _Today_ , she writes, sitting on a chuck of concrete. The remains of the big library loom overhead, protecting her from the rain. It drizzles down in a _pitter patter_ , a rush, a calming consistent noise. _Dolores and I were a bit lazy. I think the rain is quite romantic, don’t you?_

 _Pitter patter_ , _crack crunch, rocks tumbling from up high_. The rain keeps falling.

Seven continues writing. I've _been starting to mark out my compositions - I feel like I’m getting closer to making real music. It’s easier to keep track of where one composition ends and where another begins on paper. Once I’ve set my bow to the strings, the music just… comes to me_.

 _Concrete splitting, the squeal of weakened metal_. The rain drips off the lip of the makeshift shelter, but Seven and Dolores are warm and dry.

The pen scratches against the paper. _I’ve got the oddest little headache today,_ Seven admits _, Sounds are just so loud_.

Gravel falls with a series of abbreviated _clacks_ . The wind begins to pick up, rain falling heavier like a curtain _shh-shh_ ing against the ground.

Seven’s fingers tingle. Her tongue feels hot. 

_Fortunately, I rescued every medical textbook I could find that first summer. I think it’s just a migraine, and_ her pen streaks black against the paper.

Seven looks up as the big library caves in with a mighty _CRACK_.

Her eyes widen. For an endless second, the remains of the building hang in the air.

Crashing down upon her head.

“ _Shit -_ “ Seven throws her hands up, closing her eyes.

_BANG._

\---

It takes her a long, lingering moment to realize she’s not Seven paste smeared onto the ground.

Seven cracks one eye open. Then the other. She uncurls.

“Holy _shit_.”

She stands in the epicenter of flattened earth. There’s not even debris on the group, the rubble hardpacked into something solid and stable. She stomps her foot twice to prove it. Seven looks behind her, to Dolores still sitting on the bench.

“What happened?” Seven asks. “Dolores?”

“I don’t know,” Dolores responds, just as confused as she is.

It takes Seven fifty steps to reach the lip of the crater. Beyond it, the world is just as broken and filthy as before. Pieces of the library spear the ground in new and interesting configurations of destruction.

Behind her, the world is barren and sterile like a moonscape. But only around when Seven was waiting to be crushed.

Her fingertips tingle. Her tongue is hot.

The rain is coming down in a comforting _shh-shh_ , the wind playful with the tresses of her white hair. Seven is alive and unharmed.

White hair.

Seven looks down at her shaking hands, incandescent. She can see the dark smudges of bones through the glow illuminating her from the inside out.

“Dolores?” Seven squeaks. “Dolores, what’s happening to me?”

Dolores doesn’t answer.

\---

Seven is ordinary.

Seven is _ordinary._ There’s never been anything special about her at all, she’s - useless, and weak. Her shins are covered in bruises and she can see her heartbeat through her bust. She bleeds when she’s hurt and cries when she’s sad, or happy, or angry.

There is simply nothing special about you, Number Seven. The slick sound of a telescope sliding shut.

She can’t rescue herself. She’s trapped here, in the end, and no one, Five, Atticus will come for her eventually, and all she needs to do is keep breathing.

She is ordinary. Her hair is brown. Her eyes are brown. Her skin is more of a sallow peach, but that’s a kind of brown.

She is the sole survivor of the end of the world. She is the victim of a cosmic joke. She fell through time because she _slipped_ , and she has survived ever since, grudgingly, hateful, bitter.

 _Today, no one came for me_.

Seven stares at her hands until she can’t see her bones any more. She stares at the ends of her hair until it turns brown. She shakes until she’s too tired to shake any more.

It’s raining. It’s _storming_. The winds scream as they whip around the impossible crater, and Seven sits at its heart and she -

_Are you feeling brave?_

She’s just ordinary.

\---

“Did you know?” she asks Luther’s grave. “You were Number One. You were our leader. Did he tell you? Did you _know?_ ”

The wind gets faster as she gets louder. Seven’s been trying to ignore it, but it’s become difficult.

She really has been playing a duet with the sky.

“It’s not _fair_ ,” says Seven. She’s twenty, twenty one, somewhere around there, and she’s finally _like them_ , but she’s been alone for more than seven years. “It’s not _fair_ , I was - you all _hated me_ . _I_ hated _myself_.”

“I thought I deserved this,” she cries, wiping tears off her chin. “I thought this was my punishment. So what the _hell_ is _happening to me?_ ”

The shadows in the cracks of her sibling’s graves are so, _so_ black. Seven gives off more light than the cloudy sun.

“I want to go _home_ ,” she sobs. “I want to go _back_ , I want this to be _over_ . I don’t understand, _I don’t understand!_ ”

She shines. Brighter than the sun, she _shines_.

\---

She wants to ignore it, but she can’t. It’s like she opened pandora’s box - now that she’s used her powers once, they won’t leave her alone. Her hair flutters brown - white - brown, she wakes up and she’s illuminating the inside of her cabin like a star, she gestures with her hands while speaking with Dolores, and something collapses or burns or throws itself away. 

She’s stronger. Her legs stop being bruised, pale and perfect even though she’s still just as clumsy. Her hearing grows sharper. Seven remembers Mom saying that a hawk could spot a mouse in long grass from a mile away. She can hear a rat fifteen feet buried in rubble from _five_.

She listens, and doesn’t hear anyone else at all. But Seven already knew that. 

When she plays the violin now, the wind plays with her. Less a duet and more a symphony, and she is both star and conductor.

She keeps having to stop to _breathe_ , lowering her violin and waiting for the wind to die down and stop kicking up dust, gravel, whole bricks, burnt out husks of cars.

“You can control it, Seven.” Dolores urges. “Remember what your Father said to Ben, a long time ago. If he is calm, then his monsters will be too.”

Seven doesn’t want to be calm. She screams, and the sky rips open with her. She howls, and the wind rips across the streets. She cries, and the rain thunders down.

She lies on the floor of her cabin, curled around Dolores, and weeps.

She doesn’t want to be here anymore. 

She’s tired of waiting.

\---

_Today, I scaled our observatory and watched the stars with Dolores. I’ve marked down my favourite constellations of the night below._

_I thought Dolores might like the view while she rests. I put rocks in her chest so she wouldn’t roll off the platform and tucked her into her favourite blanket._

_Then I walked off the edge of the observatory._

_I’m fine, obviously. I wrote this entry after the fact. I left the journal in a sealed bag in the cabin, in case anyone came looking for an explanation. The sound of the wind whistling caught in my ears and then the wind caught me. So I’m fine. I won’t try again._

_I’m so tired of waiting._

_Today, no one came for me. I don’t think anyone will tomorrow, either._

_I’ll fetch Dolores in the morning. We can watch the sunset together. I hope she’s not mad._

\---

Dolores isn’t mad. Seven buries her face in her chest and sobs until the heavens rip open and come pouring down.

Then, they watch the sun rise.

\---

“I still like you,” Dolores says one chilly autumn evening. “It doesn’t matter to me that you have powers now. You’re the same woman I’ve known all this time.”

“It’s different,” Seven whispers.

“I know,” Dolores is smooth plastic, can’t curl her arm around Seven for the hug Seven so desperately wants. “But it doesn’t change who you are.”

“I was _ordinary_.” Seven says. “I was a failure.”

“You’re the sole living human of the end of the world,” Dolores rasps. “Everything about you is ordinary. Everything about you is special. Everything about you is… what it is.”

“You’re the survivor,” Dolores tells her. “You’re the success.”

\---

It doesn’t get cold that winter. Seven sings her bow across the strings of her violin when the first frost hits, and doesn’t allow the temperature to drop. What ecosystems can she ruin, Seven thinks cruelly, she lives in the corpse of a city that nothing good can survive in.

It gets hot that summer, but Seven doesn’t sunburn. Cloud cover followers her wherever she goes.

She craters a strip of destroyed road. She craters someone’s house. She starts moving corpses before she practices, so she doesn’t destroy bodies.

Then she digs graves.

It’s just for practice at first. Lifting bits of rubble, the violin strings thrumming in her ears. Precise, careful. Digging holes and filling them. Careful, careful. The delicacy isn’t nature, and Seven struggles with it.

The people that once lived here deserve to rest, too, she thinks. Not just the people Seven once cared about. So she digs the holes and drags the bodies into them, and stabs the graves with rebar, because someone once cared for each and every one of these bodies, and they deserved to be marked out.

No one should just be _forgotten_.

Rows, and rows of rebar stakes stand like soldiers waiting to defend a world that doesn’t exist anymore. 

Except for Seven, digging graves.

\---

It doesn’t get cold. It gets hot.

It doesn’t get cold. It gets hot.

It doesn’t get cold. It gets hot.

It doesn’t get cold. It gets hot.

It doesn’t get cold. It gets hot.

 _Today, no one came for me_.

\---

Seven’s hair turns white. 

Rather, it stops turning brown after she puts her violin back in her case. She hacks it short on Allison’s grave, crying, so she doesn’t have to see the locks out of the corner of her eyes anymore.

She loses weight and struggles to put it back on. Scavenging food is useless now, everything is expired. She spends a solid three months building a carriage and clearing a path so she can drag it without the wheels catching on debris. She piles dirt in bags and brings it back to her cabin, and tries to start a garden.

Going outside of the city limits is - odd, and uncomfortable. Seven is so used to her world of flattened brick and cracked concrete. Outside the city, there’s grass and young trees and _so much green_. More green than there should be, Seven feels.

It’s like the world never ended at all. 

For a long, lingering second, Seven wants to stay here, in the world that hasn’t ended. But she can’t hear the muffled thud of deer stepping in the springy grass, no fish swimming through the burble of water, can’t hear anything but the low whistle of wind and the distant squeaking of rats.

She needs to return home. Someone might come looking for her. She shovels dirt into her bags and drags her cart back to the city and feels -

Odd. She’ll make her own green, it’ll be okay.

\---

Nothing grows. The rain might no longer burn her skin, but working with the wet soil causes a vicious rash to cut up her hands. The skin grows back mottled and scarred, just like her feet from that first winter.

She composes music. She and Dolores dance down the streets she painstakingly cleared for no reason at all. She listens to rats squeak and die and live beneath the city, and never, ever hears another person speak.

Five - Atticus never comes.

\---

“I wonder if I can time travel,” Seven muses, plucking at the strings of her violin. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Dolores muses. “I suppose it’s possible. But you manipulate sound waves - that’s different from what Atticus does. Did.”

“Yeah.” Seven inhales, leaning her head against the wall of her shack. “Hey, Dolores?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.

“I know,” Dolores sounds amused. “I love you, too.”

Seven smiles, closing her eyes. “I’m glad I’m not alone,” she says into the darkness.

\---

She digs graves. She plays the violin. She survives on rats and weeds, and tries not to think about the poisons she’s probably putting in her body. She keeps the weather comfortable, and ignores any pains in her gut or jaw or chest.

She sits on Atticus’s grave, but she isn’t waiting any more.

Why would she?

\---

 _Today, I decided to live_.

\---

Seven and Dolores marry on the ruins of the department store where they first met. It’s not legal - there’s no such thing as legal any more. There’s no officiant, or priest, or witness or - Seven’s not sure what weddings need. Seven helps Dolores dress in her nicest sequined shirt, having laundered it the previous evening, and dresses herself in her lightest clothes in lieu of a white gown or suit. There’s no rings to be exchanged, no cake to be cut, no prayers to be blessed.

Just Seven and Dolores, under the fractured moon.

“I love you,” Seven murmurs against Dolores’s smooth, plastic mouth. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

\---

_There was no honeymoon, of course - Dolores and I are bound to remain near the Academy, just in case, and I need to eat to live. We had that first night… and we’ll have every day afterwords, to wake up with her in my arms._

_For some reason I’ve been a little out of it, lately. Not like a cold or flu - every morning I lay in the cabin longer, walk slower. It’s harder to put on my pack of supplies, not because it’s heavy._

_I thought maybe I was just staying in longer because I wanted to be with Dolores, but I’m starting to doubt that. The sun shines clearly outside, but a fog hangs over my mind and muffles everything._

_I’m happy. I’m choosing to be happy._

_Today, no one came for me._

\---

“Hot water.” she whispers. “The sound of the lunch bell. Ben’s hands. Newspapers.”

\---

The fog settles in Seven’s mind to stay. The wind stirs, and a haze settles over the city, too. Everything is white, and soft, and indistinct. It’s water vapour. It’s a shroud of death.

Seven rolls over, clutching Dolores to her chest, and tries to sleep, but she’s not tired. She’s just not alive, either.

“I feel strange,” Seven admits to her wife. Her lips brush against Dolores’s smooth head as she speaks.

“Are you sick?” Dolores asks. What does Dolores know of sickness, Seven wonders. Dolores is perfect, immortal. Nothing touches her. 

Seven holds her hand to her forehead. It’s a nearly impossible effort to shift, to bring her arm around, to press it to her head. She’s warm, but only skin warm. “I don’t think I have a fever,” she says.

“You’ve been a little low,” Dolores hums. “Tired? Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“Yes,” Seven lies. “No. I don’t know.’’

She feels funny. Like she’s bleeding out over the ground, losing all her important guts and meaty things. 

But she’s fine. She hasn’t so much as bruised since she cratered the big library. She’s strong and powerful and she shines like the sun.

Seven feels weak.

\---

“I married Dolores,” Seven tells Allison. “Ben said you had a fiancé. How’d that go? Do you love him?”

The grave doesn’t answer. Seven pulls Dolores tighter to her side.

“I was happy,” says Seven, correcting slowly “I am happy.”

\---

Things slip away from her, like sand through an hourglass. Her playing becomes lackluster. She stops speaking. Laundry is neglected, and Seven loses the will to scale to the observatory and watch the stars with Dolores. Her hair tangles on her head like the nest of birds she hasn’t seen for -

Time passes beyond the end of the world, and Seven is the only one to witness it.

\---

“I think I’ve lost my mind.” Seven leans her head back on Ben’s rebar. “Happy birthday. I’m older than you’ll ever be.”

\---

Seven recites the I.D. number etched into the back of the glass eye until it rattles in her head like loose coins. You ended the world, you ended the world, _you ended the world_.

\---

“Hello?” Seven shouts at the sky. “Hello? Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

\---

Seven bathes in cold rainwater, tipping her head up at the sky, looking down at her naked skin. She can see her heart beat through her chest. She can see her ribs, the sharp edges of her hips. Through her thighs, her femurs are a dark shadow. She is glowing like the sun.

\---

Seven stares at a book for hours before she realizes she hasn’t read a single word. She tries again. Her eyes skate over the words without comprehending them.

“Read to me?” she asks her wife. Dolores stares at the wall and doesn’t oblige.

\---

“I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home,” she chants. Her ragged fingernails cut lines down her temples. “I want to go home, I want to go home, _I want to go home, I want to go home,_ ”

\---

“It’s okay, Seven.” Dolores whispers. “Just rest.”

\---

_I’m not sure what happened today._

\---

Seven lays down next to the graves of her siblings and doesn’t get up for three days. The stones dig into her back, the sun beats down on her face. She feels hollow on the inside, like there’s something missing from her chest. She’s breathing, and she can watch her heart beat, so she’s not sure what she’s lost.

For three days she lays there. She sips at the water in her bag and chews on the side of her hand absently, feeling neither hunger nor true thirst. The cloud wisp their way across the sky, the stars glitter like the sequins on Dolores’s shirt, and none of it touches her.

She feels empty. Like something vital has come out of her chest. Like she’s bled out all her colour, turned as white as her hair. She’s incandescent, or maybe she’s just reflective. A backdrop for the ruined world to refract itself off of, kaleidoscopic.

When she first came here, everything mattered. Every day was a struggle. She was so - frustrated. And so excited, and she _knew_ , with a burning fervour, that Atticus would save her.

And he didn’t, and she’s getting old now, and she wants to lie in the dirt with her siblings and know them.

“But I,” Seven croaks. “Decided not to give up.”

\---

 _Today, I decided to live_.

Seven pauses. She taps the pen against her lips.

_Again. I decided to live again. It’s a choice I need to keep making._

\---

She gets old. No one comes.

She gets older. No one comes.

Seven keeps living, hateful, bitter, resentful, _alone_.

She refuses to die.

\---

 _Heartbeat_. 

Seven blinks awake, halfway out the cabin before she even realizes what she’s listening to.

 _Heart beating, air moving in and out of the lungs, blood rushing, the crackle of electricity in the neurons, churn of a gut digesting_.

Seven stares at the woman standing on the road. In her black raincoat and stiletto heels that will catch on every bit of debris, her heavy briefcase.

 _That’s not Atticus_ , she thinks, and then _who cares_.

The woman raises her hand, offering a little wave. Her mouth doesn’t so much as twitch from her perfect, painted smile.

She gives Seven the shakes.

 _I care_ , Seven thinks, clearing her throat to croak “Where’s Atticus?”

“He isn’t coming,” the woman responds, striding closer. She’s so very - put together, out of place. “Hello, Number Seven.”

Seven frowns. She doesn’t like this. It’s itchy somewhere, in the back of her skull. Like rats, like collapsing buildings, like expired food and sharp metal. 

“You can call me the Handler,” the woman says, never once stumbling on the uneven ground, never minding Seven’s curling lip and exposed teeth. “You’ve been alone a long time, haven’t you?”

The mock sympathy brings a snarl to Seven’s mouth. She can feel the prickle in her eyes as the colour drains out, the heat inside her skin and she begins to glow.

The woman lowers her sunglasses, something greedy in her eyes. “ _Fascinating,”_ she says, “How remarkable. How extraordinary.”

“Piss off,” Seven spits. Seven is just - _Seven_.

“I understand this must be frightening for you,” the words are right, the tone is wrong. This woman doesn’t care. “I’m here to offer you a deal, Seven.”

Seven thins her lips.

“A way out,” the woman clarifies. “To go _home_. Yes?”

Home. 

“All I need is your cooperation,” the woman continues. “A few years of service. A couple of favours. Then you’ll be free to do as you wish. To return home, if you’d like.”

“Favours,” Seven barks out a laugh. What is _happening?_ “I’ve finally lost what’s left of my mind,” she moans, bringing her hands up her scratch at her temples. “Ah, hallucinations.”

“You’ve been hallucinating for years,” that’s amusement. “But I assure you, this is very real. Don’t you want to go home, Seven?”

Seven groans, blood under her nails. _Home_ . _I want to go home_.

What is she willing to trade? Her spine hurts, her head hurts. This woman makes her feel strange and furious and _frightened_ and Seven wants her to _go away_ . Something’s wrong about her, like the burned corpse still lying exposed at the Academy, like the eye hidden away from the world, like the date, _April 1, 2019_.

But.

Seven looks at the woman from under her lashes. _Is she feeling brave?_

“What do you want?” she asks. _I want to go home._

The woman smiles.

\---

 _Today, someone came for me_.

\---  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Okay so, warnings -
> 
> Food issues, dead bodies (moderate descriptiveness, definitely some upsetting scenes), suicidal ideation (and a non graphic mention of a suicide attempt), mental trauma and declining mental health, indeterminate mental illness, coping mechanisms that are honestly not very healthy? a few (very mild) mentions of urination and vomit. Isolation grief and fear are the major themes.
> 
> I tried not to go overboard in the descriptiveness of anything like, _overtly_ upsetting but definitely tread careful if one those warnings applies to you (especially food and grief - those ones are pretty strong)
> 
> I _think_ that's everything- it's definitely all the big ones! but if you see anything else I should tag for let me know.
> 
> I'm thinking about expanding this into a two shot, with Seven's time with the commission making up the other half... I haven't decided yet, though! Let me know if you're interested.
> 
> Otherwise, back to _Two Feet Forward!_


End file.
